I’ve spent this weekend researching a wide variety of different python libraries for a pet project that may never come to fruition. To my delight, most of the projects I was interested were documented in Sphinx and the documentation had been posted online using Read The Docs or a self-hosted site.

Some of the projects only include API documentation, while others also include helpful guides or tutorials. However, None of the projects I visited had links back to the project website and source code repository in their documentation. Some had such links hidden on a contributing or download page.

A lot of the time, my Duck Duck Go results link me directly to the documentation for a project I haven’t heard of. I read the APIs and think, “hey, I’d like to try this out.” Then I have a bit of trouble actually finding the project’s home page.

So documentation authors: Please add prominent links to your project’s home page, as well as source code repository and issue trackers to your documentation.